Rating: 4½ stars
When he burst into public recognition in 1968, people either regarded
Tiny Tim as a lovable wacko, or simply a wacko; though Tim's eccentricity seemed both
charming and oddly appropriate in the wake of the Summer of Love, despite his long hair and beatific
attitude, he was no hippie, but instead an amateur archivist of
American popular song who made it his life's crusade to remind people
about the joys of the Tin Pan Alley era. In his own odd way, Tiny Tim was one of the first
artists of the rock era to celebrate the notion of the great American
songbook, though his fondness for a warbling falsetto delivery, his thrift-store wardrobe, his
slightly fey personality and his championing of the ukulele as his
favored means of accompaniment was every bit as anomalous in 1968 as it would be today. While
Tiny Tim was (principally) marketed as a novelty act and treated as a
joke by many who presented him to the public (one of his most frequent television
platforms was on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In), Tiny wasn't kidding --
he loved and lived for this music, and he performed it in a historically
accurate manner, remaining true to his musical vision right up to the very end (he died in
1996 moments after performing his umpteenth rendition of "Tip-Toe Through The Tulips" for a women's club
in Minneapolis.) While Tiny Tim stubbornly continued to record up until his death, far and away his most successful album
was his 1968 debut on Reprise Records, God Bless Tiny Tim, in which producer Richard Perry
created a thoroughly charming if occasionally outré musical spectacular around the crooner, and he
would record two other albums under Perry's tutelage before
Reprise pulled the plug on Tim's major label recording career. Ten
years after Tiny Tim's death, his work for Reprise has finally made its way to CD in a
limited-edition box set from Rhino Handmade, God Bless Tiny Tim --
The Complete Reprise Studio Masters And More. This three-disc set
collects Tim's three Reprise LP's -- God Bless Tiny Tim, the equally charming follow-up Tiny
Tim's Second Album, and the uneven children's disc For All My Little
Friends -- along with a handful of non-LP singles and a few unreleased tracks. Most
interesting for Tiny Tim enthusiasts will be the material on disc
three, which features thirty-nine demos in which Tim joyously reels off one song after another,
as if he could go on for days on end if there were time and tape
enough. The re-mastering of the audio is splendid, and Barry Hansen (aka Dr. Demento)
provides a superb biographical essay for the accompanying booklet.
With the possible exception of Ian Whitcomb, there's never been a "one hit wonder" who
has done as much to document the history of American popular music as
Tiny Tim, and God Bless Tiny Tim: The Complete Reprise Studio Masters
And More finally gives him the belated tribute he deserved; anyone with
any interest in this strange but gifted artist at the peak of his fame (and his abilities) needs to
hop on the internet and get this set while it lasts.
Click Here For More Information, Track List And To Order.